Graham, Lonnie

Family, community, and spirituality have been consistent themes in the work of photographer and installation artist Lonnie Graham for the past fifteen years. Graham was raised by his Aunt Dora and Uncle Floyd in the town of Seldom Seen, Pennsylvania, halfway between Pittsburgh and Uniontown. His life with Dora and Floyd is the pivotal influence in his exploration of family and spirituality. His extensive travels to Africa in the 1980s, and his job as director of the photography department and chief curator for the Manchester Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, were experiences that shaped his sense of community.

Because Graham arrived at his central themes of family, spirituality, and community over time and through experience they flow easily through his work whether in a complex installation or simple series of portraits. In a Spirit House, Aunt Dora's Room is a pivotal installation Graham completed in 1993 at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Graham was out of the country when his Aunt Dora died, and to honor her memory he began to enlarge some of the photographs he took of her from as far back at 1963. He used one of the portraits to make a large silkscreen print on translucent cloth and decided to mount the image in a doorway. Upon viewing the print in the doorway Graham realized that, 'suddenly you're looking into another room and you have this ghostly figure standing there.' This realization encouraged Graham to further explore the spirituality of his boyhood home. Graham went back to Seldom Seen, collected all of Dora's living room furniture, and installed it in a gallery at the Fabric Workshop, including the original silkscreen of Dora's portrait. The installation, which reminds us of our losses, was prophetic. A fire later consumed Dora's house, and the installation is now all that remains of Graham's childhood home. The installation is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, and Floyd and Dora, who encouraged Graham to make art in the first place, now have their old belongings elevated to museum pieces.

In his most recent work, which he continued to pursue during his residency at Light Work, Graham extends his notion of how family and community are connected by memory, over distance, and through difference, in a series of portraits titled Tribal Nations, made in Africa, New Guinea, and the United States. In one image from the series Graham made a portrait in Kenya of a young man holding two chickens. While the picture describes a practice that might seem foreign to modern city dwellers, one could imagine the picture being made at any time in the past fifty years in rural Mississippi, or any number of places where you would expect to find people of African descent. Graham's photograph titled Man with a Saw, Vumba, Zimbabwe exhibits the same kind of elusive description of time and place. In both pictures Graham has allowed simple gestures to describe universal activities of labor and subsistence. Both images seem to suggest that life is very simple--when you are hungry you get a chicken and eat it, when you need shelter or warmth you cut down a tree, build a fire, and go to sleep. We know that life is not that simple yet these portraits persist in suggesting that perhaps it is not so complicated either. Graham moves from anonymous to specific descriptions in his portraits titled Mr. Rock and Roll, Detroit, Michigan and John Taniova, Papua, New Guinea. Both pictures are linked to very different places by the outward styles of the subjects' clothes and adornments, yet the gestures that they both use to present themselves to the camera are nearly identical. Like the previous pair of portraits these pictures seem to quietly suggest that as we move forward in modern times we are also pulled back to basic desires for self-expression.

In his installation Aunt Dora's Room Graham transformed his aunt's prosaic possessions into a celebration of spirituality and memory. In this new series of portraits Graham explores how similarities and differences can be brought into the same room so that they might seem as familiar as our own everyday surroundings.

The concept of an interview or conversation is rooted in our inherent desire to communicate. Volumes have been published as a testament to their efficacy in addressing that need and our seemingly unending quest for knowledge. A Conversation with the World seeks to identify and reinforce the commonality of humanity. This project was conceived in 1984 in San Francisco, CA as a collaboration between photographer Kevin Martin and myself. At that time, we proposed to travel the world and document our encounters with random individuals by recording interviews and taking portraits.

Over time, this project has gone through a number of incarnations. I asked James Wylie, a professor at the Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences in New York City, to formulate a series of questions that could be directed to the individuals preceding each photographic portrait. The questions were authored to address the essential issues relative to human existence. I believed that given the opportunity to respond in a relatively candid manner, the responses would act as a kind of template by which one could measure the universality of the human condition.

Individuals were chosen for interviews completely at random without reference to social status, political, or philosophical predilection. After encountering thousands of individuals and making tens of thousands of photographs, what becomes clear is the unyielding necessity to confront and to seek out our truer selves.

Our ancestors commonly serve a singular purpose. The balance of life is defined by its cyclical nature, and there seems to be a general understanding that we cannot exist without others. My question is, if we understand this about ourselves at this very basic level, why do we not afford common levels of decency, honor, and respect to one another as human beings? In order to advance as a race, I believe that we must learn about our weaknesses and explore the possibility of who we might become through a greater understanding of ourselves. This is how I would like to begin the conversation.

Family, community, and spirituality have been consistent themes in the work of photographer and installation artist Lonnie Graham for the past fifteen years. Graham was raised by his Aunt Dora and Uncle Floyd in the town of Seldom Seen, Pennsylvania, halfway between Pittsburgh and Uniontown. His life with Dora and Floyd is the pivotal influence in his exploration of family and spirituality. His extensive travels to Africa in the 1980s, and his job as director of the photography department and chief curator for the Manchester Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, were experiences that shaped his sense of community.

Because Graham arrived at his central themes of family, spirituality, and community over time and through experience they flow easily through his work whether in a complex installation or simple series of portraits. In a Spirit House, Aunt Dora's Room is a pivotal installation Graham completed in 1993 at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Graham was out of the country when his Aunt Dora died, and to honor her memory he began to enlarge some of the photographs he took of her from as far back at 1963. He used one of the portraits to make a large silkscreen print on translucent cloth and decided to mount the image in a doorway. Upon viewing the print in the doorway Graham realized that, 'suddenly you're looking into another room and you have this ghostly figure standing there.' This realization encouraged Graham to further explore the spirituality of his boyhood home. Graham went back to Seldom Seen, collected all of Dora's living room furniture, and installed it in a gallery at the Fabric Workshop, including the original silkscreen of Dora's portrait. The installation, which reminds us of our losses, was prophetic. A fire later consumed Dora's house, and the installation is now all that remains of Graham's childhood home. The installation is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, and Floyd and Dora, who encouraged Graham to make art in the first place, now have their old belongings elevated to museum pieces.

In his most recent work, which he continued to pursue during his residency at Light Work, Graham extends his notion of how family and community are connected by memory, over distance, and through difference, in a series of portraits titled Tribal Nations, made in Africa, New Guinea, and the United States. In one image from the series Graham made a portrait in Kenya of a young man holding two chickens. While the picture describes a practice that might seem foreign to modern city dwellers, one could imagine the picture being made at any time in the past fifty years in rural Mississippi, or any number of places where you would expect to find people of African descent. Graham's photograph titled Man with a Saw, Vumba, Zimbabwe exhibits the same kind of elusive description of time and place. In both pictures Graham has allowed simple gestures to describe universal activities of labor and subsistence. Both images seem to suggest that life is very simple--when you are hungry you get a chicken and eat it, when you need shelter or warmth you cut down a tree, build a fire, and go to sleep. We know that life is not that simple yet these portraits persist in suggesting that perhaps it is not so complicated either. Graham moves from anonymous to specific descriptions in his portraits titled Mr. Rock and Roll, Detroit, Michigan and John Taniova, Papua, New Guinea. Both pictures are linked to very different places by the outward styles of the subjects' clothes and adornments, yet the gestures that they both use to present themselves to the camera are nearly identical. Like the previous pair of portraits these pictures seem to quietly suggest that as we move forward in modern times we are also pulled back to basic desires for self-expression.

In his installation Aunt Dora's Room Graham transformed his aunt's prosaic possessions into a celebration of spirituality and memory. In this new series of portraits Graham explores how similarities and differences can be brought into the same room so that they might seem as familiar as our own everyday surroundings.

The concept of an interview or conversation is rooted in our inherent desire to communicate. Volumes have been published as a testament to their efficacy in addressing that need and our seemingly unending quest for knowledge. A Conversation with the World seeks to identify and reinforce the commonality of humanity. This project was conceived in 1984 in San Francisco, CA as a collaboration between photographer Kevin Martin and myself. At that time, we proposed to travel the world and document our encounters with random individuals by recording interviews and taking portraits.

Over time, this project has gone through a number of incarnations. I asked James Wylie, a professor at the Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences in New York City, to formulate a series of questions that could be directed to the individuals preceding each photographic portrait. The questions were authored to address the essential issues relative to human existence. I believed that given the opportunity to respond in a relatively candid manner, the responses would act as a kind of template by which one could measure the universality of the human condition.

Individuals were chosen for interviews completely at random without reference to social status, political, or philosophical predilection. After encountering thousands of individuals and making tens of thousands of photographs, what becomes clear is the unyielding necessity to confront and to seek out our truer selves.

Our ancestors commonly serve a singular purpose. The balance of life is defined by its cyclical nature, and there seems to be a general understanding that we cannot exist without others. My question is, if we understand this about ourselves at this very basic level, why do we not afford common levels of decency, honor, and respect to one another as human beings? In order to advance as a race, I believe that we must learn about our weaknesses and explore the possibility of who we might become through a greater understanding of ourselves. This is how I would like to begin the conversation.